This study explores how Black men make sense of their mental health experiences within secondary school contexts and how these accounts can inform school-based practice. Drawing on Black Liberation Psychology and Social Constructionism, the research adopts Emerson and Frosh’s (2009) Critical Narrative Analysis to examine how participants construct meaning in relation to schooling, distress, and mental health support.
Data were generated through a focus group with four Black men reflecting retrospectively on their secondary school experiences, followed by a second session in which participants co-created artefacts, including a collective poem and written messages for educational practitioners. These were treated as interconnected spaces for meaning-making, enabling both dialogic and creative forms of expression.
The analysis generated nine interpretive narratives that illustrate how distress was experienced and understood within racialised school environments. Mental health was constructed not simply as an individual psychological concern, but as shaped by repeated experiences of racial harm, misrecognition, conditional belonging, and adaptation. Participants challenged deficit-based interpretations by positioning their responses as meaningful adaptations to institutional conditions. Strategies such as code-switching, emotional restraint, and reliance on peers were understood as necessary responses to these environments.
The findings highlight how school-based mental health support can become inaccessible when the racialised and relational dimensions of Black boys’ experiences are overlooked. The study contributes to Educational Psychology by foregrounding lived narratives as valuable forms of psychological knowledge and demonstrating the impact of racism on Black boys’ mental health within school contexts. It further challenges individualised and Westernised understandings of mental health and calls for more relational, culturally responsive, and liberatory approaches to Educational Psychology and school-based mental health practice.
